Aesthetaphysicks and the Anti-Dialectical Hyperoccultation of Disenchanted Representation
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Aesthetaphysicks
and the
Anti-Dialectical Hyperoccultation
of
Disenchanted Representation:
Hyperstitional Esoterrorism as Occultural Accelerationism
Robert Elio Cabrales
University of Amsterdam
Theology and Religious Studies Master’s Thesis: Western Esotericism
August 30th, 2019Contents
Plex
• Becoming Sorcerer
• Hyperstitional Ontology-Cybernetics
• Accelerationism (Teleology of Capital-Time Modulations)
• Occultural Esoterrorism
• Aesthetaphysickal Reflexivity: Occultural Accelerationism & Hyperstitional
Esoterrorism
Time-Circuit
• Chaos Reigns
• Theater of the [Black (Plague) Mass]
• Anti-Dialectical Dismemberment Networks
• Cybernetic Occulture
Warp
• Swarm DynamicsAesthetaphysicks and the
Anti-Dialectical Hyperoccultation
of Disenchanted Representation:
Hyperstitional Esoterrorism as Occultural Accelerationism
Robert E. Cabrales, University of Amsterdam, 2019
MA Thesis - Theology & Religious Studies: Western Esotericism
Plex
A viral rot festers on the precipice of Representation. This contagion liquifies the sinewy
retentions of unity, violating the limits of ordered thought and centralized identity. Deliquesced
discharge oozes from the pores of a once sedentary territory. Wracked by plague, Representation
becomes monstrous: a presentation of an alien alterity which transgresses semiotic stasis. The
subversive infestation of reality unfolds across the spectrum of contemporary culture.
Postmodern thought has identified the unnecessary and oppressive rigidity of normative
social constructs and as such, Philosophers, Occultists, Artists, Magicians, Xenomorphs, and
Sorcerers have provided subversive analyses, theories, methods, and practices for destabilizing
Control-Society.
Becoming Sorcerer
With an accelerated production of and access to information having advanced throughout the
twentieth century, a Rhizomatic systematics of communication networks was consequentially
unearthed by Post-Structural Philosophy.1 Rhizomatic networks became through and as
decentralized hyper-linkages continuously establishing and terminating their connections in a
state of non-hierarchical flux. Information in these networks is thus decentralized, relative, and
contextual; what information ‘means’ and furthermore what it ‘does’ is determined by the
operative performance through which the information is conveyed. Any singular performance of
information-articulation cannot then claim to be the sole and authoritative ‘Truth’ on a matter, as
there are numerous other ‘True’ claims from different perspectives and locations; but a singular
claim may still maintain its performative truth relative to the context in which it is operative. A
1
Lafontaine “The Cybernetic Matrix of French Theory,” 39; Eriksson, “On the Ontology of Networks,” 315-318.
1Rhizomatic-Network-Ontology in this way articulates Reality as a complex system substantiated
by heterogeneric multiplicity. The reality-network is established and whole, but this holism is not
as a unification, rather a territory of cut-up and entangled communication in constant nonlinear
feedback, moving and shifting to (re)create its own fluid boundaries.
As a territory of communication, a Rhizomatic network can be performed as a field of
narration; it is an immanent performance influencing and influenced by itself. Whether this
narrative is consistent or inconsistent is determined by control systems and mechanisms (or a
lack thereof) employed throughout the Rhizome. As control mechanisms, Rationality,
Materialism, and Objectivity have been institutionally employed through various information
acquisition methodologies. As such, the canonization of these mechanisms across Rhizomatic
networks has codified a consistent narrative of and as information, enacting a semiotic
territorialization of structural and instrumental stability, thus ontologically reified in, through,
and as Representational Reality. The institutional-reification-machine developed from the
Material-Rationality complex is in this way a dominant control system of and for contemporary
thought, restricting the territorial fluidity of the Rhizomatic reality-network by erecting
boundaries for Representation.
To destabilize the consistent and normalized narrative of a controlled and bound semiotic
territory, the experimental twentieth-century scholars Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
articulated a philosophy of ‘sorcerous Becomings’ through which an ordered narrative could be
deconstructed and deterratorialized, thus birthing fluid non-representation into increasingly
fragmented, schizophrenic narrations.2 These sorcerous Becomings are “the multiplicity of
experiential states in which lines are blurred between human consciousness and animal
awareness, between biopsychic life and the nature of matter itself… Becomings accrue at the
vanishing point where history and legend meet, at the twilight horizon where monstrosities of
fiction reveal dynamics that translate the most profound facts of biophysical life.”3 A becoming
2
While the writings of Deleuze & Guattari are integral to this work (specifically A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism &
Schizophrenia) a thorough engagement of their theory is beyond the scope of this thesis. As a simplified overview,
the two Post-Structural thinkers developed a theory (among many) called Schizo-Analysis, by which systems and
networks were explained through a process of complexification rather a reductive and restricting simplification.
Schizophrenia in this context is then a psycho-geo-philosophical term referring to the ‘fracturing’ of unified
‘territories’ as a ‘deterritorialization’. For more on D&G see Delpech-Ramey, “Deleuze, Guattari, and the ‘Politics of
Sorcery,’ and O’Sullivan, “Deleuze Against Control: Fictioning to Myth-Science.”
3
Delpech-Ramey, “Deleuze, Guattari, and the ‘Politics of Sorcery’,” 10.
2is then a conjuration of the outside from within, the intertextual release of alien information
pulsating forth from holes in narrative structure. To become is to be born of unlike relations, not
as a kind but as a state, performatively actualizing a potentiality of thought and thus
ontologically representing the hitherto non-represented.4 As such, Sorcery is the invocational
manifestation of these becomings. The sorcerer conceptually integrates plagues, madness, and
swarming contagion into the very fabric of reality, a semiotic infection spread throughout the
Rhizomatic-network creating and (re)engineering an “unlimited flow of semiosis” by which the
singular and ordered narrative gives way to a chaotic and schizophrenic multiplicity of
meanings.5
As an act of ontological fecundity hinged on creative production, the performative
invocation and infestation of sorcerous becomings is an Aesthetic endeavor. A sorcerer is the
Philosopher who engineers concepts and the artist whom invokes realities; the sorcerer is both of
these yet also neither, alienated from a unified identity and thus queering the rigid confines of
subjectivity. Philosophy and Art now blur beyond distinction, radicalizing the relativity and
representational potential of images, words, and performance as a performative instantiation of
the very theory put forth. An infiltration of communication has commenced such that the
incommunicable outside beyond what is represented is no longer something kept at a distance
beyond the threshold of measurement itself. The outside can now possess the social organism,
enacting its demonic influence from within.
Hyperstitional Ontology-Cybernetics
What constitutes ‘The Real,’ ‘what is,’ or ‘Reality,’ is a navigation of Onto-Temporal
systematics by which organizational information feeds into, out of, and back into itself,
cybernetically conditioning a territory of consistent representation. Here Cybernetics can be
contextually engaged as communicated information-processing within complex systems; it is the
performance of adaptational technologies which learn from themselves through feedback-loops
instantiated by input-output causality. Cybernetics is thus the regulated evolution of a system
through itself, though subject to external affect.6
4
MacCormack, “Lovecraft through Deleuzo-Guattarian Gates,” 5.
5
Aichele, “Demons of the new Polytheism,” The Lure of the Dark Side: Satan & Western Demonology in Popular
Culture, 147.
6
For an overview of Cybernetics see Zhuravlev & Gurevich, “Sixty Years of Cybernetics.”
3Locating Ontology as a cybernetic system contextualizes ‘the study of being’ as a
descriptive and prescriptive performance: questioning, affirming, and multi-chronically
producing reality as Being-which-is; Ontology is the performative being of a semiotic territory
in, as, and through itself. In this way, the production and maintenance of an ontological model
both opens up and delineates that which is and can be. The systematic communication between
reality and the ontological model generates a feedback-loop of and for representation by which
‘Representational Reality’ - or, the reality of that which is represented in and by the ontological
model – controls and conditions the limits thereof. What is present in reality is re-presented by
the ontological model; but what is present in the model is also re-presented by and as reality.
Materiality and its correspondent immateriality are the reality-conditions of the dominant
ontological model, the primary control system which has territorialized the rhizomatic becoming
of reality.7 What ontologically ‘is’ and ‘can’ perform their actuality factually through
materiality, while what ‘cannot’ still paradoxically is, though subjugated to a virtual and
immaterial existence: Fiction. With the distribution of ontological analysis and development to
Modern disciplines such as Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Neurology - maintained within the
“transcendental” confines of linear chronology, or History - reality’s semiotic flow has been
institutionally restricted and organized into a consistent, unified, and ongoing explanatory
narrative. Within a Rhizomatic-Network-Ontology, the operative binaries of Fact and Fiction,
Real and Unreal, and Actual and Virtual are upheld in so far as they are systematically
maintained by control programs feeding into each other throughout society and culture; but from
the rhizomatic perspective in which cybernetic inter-causality is an immanent event, the
structured binaries are subject to manipulation.
A reality which becomes as something multiple and interrelated - though still socio-
culturally territorialized by binary operations – represents the multiplicity of its network
regardless of the representational conditions. “What is’ and ‘what cannot’ are both represented
and perform throughout the rhizome respectively as ‘real’ things. The difference between these
two entangled performances is then their degree of immanent becoming, or their performative
relation to the ‘Plane of Immanence’.8 For material and factual becomings such as matter, art-
7
Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 156-162.
8
Ibid, 35-60.
4objects, or gender, the degree of immanence by which they are is Actual; whereas those which
are deemed immaterial or fictional such as ghosts, demons, and Time-Travel become by a
Virtual degree of immanence. Here it is of note that the actual is not necessarily restricted to
materiality in its self. Gender, though a social construct which is intellectually engaged as an
idea which is not physical, is none-the-less actual insofar as it is an idea which is then performed
with, by, and through materiality as a specific expression of any one person’s continuously
developing Gender identity.9 The inverse of this is at play with Time-Travel; though it is
theoretically grounded and substantiated by and through physics and thus materiality, Time-
Travel itself (as far as we are aware) performs exclusively as a theoretical idea throughout media
and academia, and as such by the virtual degree of culture, be it novels, movies, or Theoretical
Physics articles. The differentiation between actual and virtual reality - between fact and fiction -
is thus determined by the degree of performance relative to the representational conditions of
control.
By engaging (and thus cybernetically conditioning) reality as a rhizomatic performance
of and as immanent becoming, the controlled opposition between Fact and Fiction begins to
loosen. Though History in this Rhizomatic-Network-Ontology functions as a virtual idea,
through inter-plane-feedback History modifies the temporal actualities of time which is no longer
itself actual, manipulating an onto-temporal becoming as the past which ‘actually’ was as such.
Given this virtual-actual feedback modification complex, Fictions thus maintain a performative
mode to become real things, Hyperstitions cybernetically modifying history and tradition to
reveal their own becoming in reality.
Hyperstitions are Fictions which make themselves real.10 Though first identified in the
1990s by experimental Philosophers composing the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU)
at Warwick University, the concept Hyperstition in and through itself now plagues the entirety of
human culture and Ontological Temporality.11 The very act of naming reverse ascribes that
9
See Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.”
10
CCRU, “Appendix 1: CCRU Glossary,” CCRU Complete Writings 1997-2003, 363.
11
Cutting together disciplines, experimenting with creative unbelief, and casting multi-temporal fictions across
rhizomatic becoming, the CCRU was “a rigorously unbelievable exercise in hyperpunk pulp-occultism and dark-side
cyber-jargon, splicing chunks of an impending calculus into fake memories of hell.” CCRU, “Review of CCRU’s
Digital Hyperstition,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 15.
5which is named. 12 Hyperstition (itself Hyperstitional) then actualized its own becoming real the
moment it began to infect Rhizomatic information networks. Hyperstitionalization is an idea
which performs itself through its own explication: it names the very act of onto-temporal reality
production that becomes through the act of naming itself. This cyclical practice of descriptive
affirmation – the ascryptive enunciation of that which ‘is’ – is a trans-temporal exercise which
takes place simultaneously in the indexical Now, the Past, and a plotted Future; it as a
performative narrative which is constantly rewriting itself from the future through the past. 13 In
this way, ‘Hyperstition’ transgresses the limits of ontological reification in its identification that
the ontological model is as such only through the reflexivity of re-presented representation-
cybernetics.
The subversive Onto-Temporal manipulations Hyperstitions perform operate from and as
creative becomings. In this way Hyperstitionalization is an operation of applied Aesthetics, a
semiotic insurgency which rewrites dominant narratives. Hyperstition is sorcery, and its aesthetic
performance bleeds into cultural networks, functioning as a postmodern Art theory and praxis for
multi-temporal reality engineering.
Accelerationism (Teleology of Capital-Time Modulations)
The Material-Rational control system territorializing rhizomatic becoming as an ontological
model has industrialized reality through politico-cultural economic feedback. As a performative
system, the codified narrative conditioning Representational Reality has evolved over time,
responding to Onto-Epistemic problems which result from former problem-solutions employed
throughout a socio-cultural information matrix. These Onto-Epistemic problems are “situated,
contextual, and embodied,” cracks, holes, and voids in the immanent whole of the narrative
construct.14 It is up to those performing within and as the semiotic field of representation to
12
This Reverse-Ascription, or Ascryption, is the attribution of cause to effect: a name which brings about the thing
named. Amy Ireland, “The Poemenon: Form as Occult Technology,” 13.
13
An example of this phenomenon could be the ‘Natural Law’ of Gravity. Isaac Newton’s identification of Gravity in
the seventeenth century cast Gravity as an actual performative element throughout not only the universe of that
present time, but back to the beginning of time itself and to its end. When Gravity was then theoretically
manipulated by Albert Einstein in the twentieth century, this revision was actualized through the multi-temporality
of Hyperstitional feedback, and consequently reality was always actually as such.
14
Egil Asprem, The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse 1900 - 1939, 29.
6address these problems, either through the paranoid perpetuation of the represented territory, or
by schizophrenic deterritorializations conjuring the non-represented alien from within.15
Material-Rationality and Empirical Objectivity have been cybernetically reified by and as
the dominant control system through the teleonomic development of institutionalized problem-
solving.16 The intellectual Enlightenment germinated in the 18th century commenced a semiotic
infestation of reality, effectuating positive feedback-loops for its own contagion. An
implementation of Scientific solutions to the representational problems of reality catalyzed the
need for Scientific methodology to then respond to the problems created by the former Scientific
solutions; solving the problems and answering the questions faced by Material-Rationality and
Empirical Objectivity required rationality and empirical-materialist methods, thus reifying the
model through itself, delving deeper and deeper into an explanation of an explanation, and
performatively modeling a performance of a model.17 Through and by the dialectical
experimentation of Empirical materiality, Representation is then institutionally reified on a linear
axiom, developing itself horizontally and vertically within the fixed territory charted by the
Science-institution rather than exploring the outside and expanding the map through the
unknown. It is in this way that the ‘Secularization’ of semiosis has evolved a ‘Disenchanted’
Ontology, unwriting the causal authority of Religious and ‘Occult’ codifications performing
throughout representation prior to the Enlightenment.
Scientific representation furthermore limits semiotic flow through its engagement with
technoscientific commodification. The causal interplay of Materiality and Science through
technological development feeds into and is correspondently fed by Capitalism. Scientific
developments are progressed by new technology, and new technology is made possible through
the progression of scientific developments; technology is a commodity and Science is an
industry, their entanglements reverberating Epistemically, Ontologically, and Multi-temporally
across Rhizomatic becomings. The technoscientific reification of Material-Rationalism through a
filter of productive commodification has commodified representation itself, conditioning a
reality represented by and through objects with productive and monetary values. This Object-
Commodity codification has seeped throughout the socio-cultural matrix, infecting not just
15
Aichele, “Demons of the New Polytheism,” The Lure of the Dark Side, 135-150.
16
Teleonomy can be understood as step-by-step evolution; not necessarily with a specific end goal, but within a
general goal of developmental adaptation.
17
See footnote 13.
7Ontological, Epistemic, and technological navigations, but Aesthetics, affective biopsychic life,
and Time itself.
Creative imaginings of ‘the Future’ have been restricted and conditioned by the plague of
Capital, performing cross-culturally as the Futures Industry. This Futures Industry is the
performance of semiotic territorializations for Time yet-to-come; it is a decentralized swarm of
consumption by which creative media depicting future technology, people, civilization, and
timelines maintain an oracular function, transmitting messages from a possible future toward
which society may advance. These oracular transmissions enact presentational pre-
representations (or prepresentations) of temporal flow: Onto-Aesthetic semiotic performances by
which the Futures Industry retrochronically conditions the technoscientific advancement of
Representational becomings, directing or diverting narrative developments. The transmissions
from the Futures Industry feed technoscientific commodity production and simultaneously the
ontological paranoia maintaining the material-capital network of the dominant reality program.
The prepresentational Onto-Aesthetics of the Futures Industry thus circulate lines of flight by
which the development of society may begin to pick up speed and mobilize an expansion of the
representational territory.18 For an anthropocentric technoscientific territory, this enacts the
acquisition of new commodities of utility and recreation whose use will be primarily accessible
(at least initially) to the privileged minority of the affluent, and whose production will monetarily
benefit large corporations. For socio-cultural narratives, society receives messages of ‘Post’ eras,
such as performances of Posthuman subjects or Post-Capitalism civilizations.
Posthuman representations within the Futures Industry maintain the capacity to introduce
new ways of being as embodied subjects and to question binaries and oppressive categorizations
of ‘what it means to be human,’ such as human and nature, race, gender, sex, or human and
machine;19 yet the Posthuman can also be ignored by the Futures Industry, reifying the rigidity of
contemporary codifications within a technologically advanced society: a culture in which
technology has advanced both the relative quality and functionality of life and yet hetero-sexual
gender norms, hypermasculinity, and institutional racism still structure and condition social
being. Post-Capitalism representations then depict how and if humanity can exit Capitalism. The
18
O’Sullivan, “Deleuze Against Control: Fictioning to Myth-Science,” 207-209.
19
For an initial work on this topic see Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in
the Twentieth Century.
8narratives which infest the prepresentational networks of Post-Capitalism performance have
come to manifest dystopian or hyper-fascist futures; the prepresentation of a successful exit from
Capitalism has lost traction and momentum as Utopic representation fades further into the
obscurity of non-representation. With an entangled complex of Technoscientific prosperity
juxtaposed against dystopian horror narratives as the cost of Capitalism’s exit, the Futures
Industry functions to maintain the sociopolitical inevitability of the Material-Capitalism’s
perdurance; it “encourages us to place our material investment in only a narrow range of futures
that are produced by corporations as the chief mechanism by which we are encouraged
affectively to invest in the possibilities of capitalism.”20 The future is something to be survived,
and maintaining the dominant control system is the means to and only option for survival.21
Rather than succumb to the fixed semiotic flow conditioned by the technoscientific
Futures-feedback within and through the performativity of the dominant ontological model,
multi-temporal sorcery has the capacity to rewrite and invoke narratives by and with History’s
actualizing-capacity for Onto-Aesthetic flow. The multi-temporal ramifications of Hyperstition
and Hyperstitionalization identify the possibility of sending ideas through time, thus
manipulating the immanent becoming of History as a territorial narrative within and as a
Rhizomatic-Network. Hyperstitions travel trans-temporally throughout the virtual matrix of
History, transmitting messages from the future through the past and establishing cybernetic
feedback by which virtual realities become actually real. A Hyperstition which becomes virtually
in the past will then be reified in, though, and as History, cybernetically actualizing its
performative presence within the contemporary sociocultural matrix. Furthermore, Hyperstitions
with a virulent infection rate – those ideas which perform and spread in and as a multiplicity
themselves – maintain the deterritorializing function of plotting a trajectory into a future ulterior
to the controlled developments of the ontological model conditioning and conditioned by
Technoscientific capitalist culture.
-
The theory of Time by which Hyperstitions rhizomatically operate can be identified as
Accelerationism. Another theory manifest through the CCRU, Accelerationism in the first two
decades of the twenty-first century has already been employed for political ends, establishing
20
Kingsmith & Ali, “COSMIC SLOP: Possibilities of Alien Futures (From the Past),” 2.
21
Ibid.
9communications with Posthuman futures aligned with the sociopolitical semiotics of both ‘Left’
and ‘Far-Right’ value narratives.22 Abstracted from its performative operations, Accelerationism
theoretically performs the idea that Time – as a concept reflexively employed within ‘time itself’
–territorializes temporality (and thus itself as Time) as a ‘transcendental’ entity. The
performative presence of this transcendental entity located in an immanent network of rhizomatic
becoming allows for affective Onto-Temporal manipulations. Ideas can be Accelerated through
the past from Lost-Futures virtually haunting History; Contemporary ideas can be collapsed into
positive feedback-loops accelerating their becoming as a Future construct; Ideas which are in no
way represented can even manifest in reality and spread their presentational actuality by a
hybridization of the former two Accelerationist modes, cybernetically re-presenting the alien
semiotics of and as a maddening unknown. Accelerationist theory locates the very becoming of
futures, plotting trajectories which deterritorialize the unopposed narrative constraints
maintained by the fixed semiosis of the technoscientific ontological model qua commodifying
Futures Industry.
By manipulating History through the cybernetic acceleration of Hyperstitions,
Accelerationists deterritorialize the controlled narrative of Time and manipulate its temporalized
trajectory rather than propagate the semiotic rigidity of the performance which at present holds
the stage. Throughout the territorialized ‘whole’ which prescribes and describes the semiotic
flow of representation, there are necessarily cracks and holes, voids of narrative lapse, breakage,
and inconsistency by which Fictions may infiltrate History and make themselves real.23
Identified above as the Onto-Epistemic ‘Problems’ whose solutions institutionally evolve
Representational Reality, holes are also established Onto-Aesthetically though the caustic noise
of Hauntological feedback and Sorcery. Hauntological holes become through the death of a
timeline: failures of Futures and the unengaged presence of affective concepts or systems which
then haunt culture as virtual specters. Holes which become through sorcerous intervention are
performative void manifestations: rifts ripped open through the retrochronic recalibrations of
invocational transmissions; viral cells conjured forth through creative acts and strategically
located where their infection rates will thrive. Identifying the presence of a hole then initiates a
complex by which the holes must be filled, or rather developed into the dominant narrative. The
22
See pages 46-48.
23
For a thorough engagement of this phenomenon and its academic history see Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 41-67.
10relationship between whole and void – the ( )hole complex - thus establishes input locations for
both the hyper and inter-textual integration of rejected, non-actualized, and virtual ideas into
narrative flow.
Embedded in the virtual-actual feedback modification complex of historicization,
insurgent Fictions are hypercamouflaged within the performance of History. With an ‘overlap
and coincidence’ between Fiction and Fact, Hyperstitions gain speed such that their actual
Historical presence may then be operated as and through prepresentational Onto-Aesthetics. This
anti-dialectical methodology negates the linear notion of ‘Progress’ by which new elements are
‘let in’ to the semiotic flow of representations on the condition that they can be afforded by
society.24 It is not the proposition of parallel, oppositional, and antithetical semiotics, but the
creative invocation of an unseen semiotics into representation which then infects the Onto-
Aesthetic network. Accelerationism does not simply produce idealized or utopian futures as
creative media performances, nor does it exclusively locate explicitly Post-Capitalist futures.
Through anti-dialectic insurgency, Accelerationist theory actualizes sociocultural components
and flows. These vector components which are then historically present can thus function to
produce lines of flight outside of and yet still operating affectively within the technoscientific
commodification industry of Material-Capitalism. With this theory in play, social culture gains a
tool to contrast the inevitability of reified re-presentation. What is ‘Post’ both Human and
Capitalism is no longer restricted to the authority of Capital development; what is useful,
valuable, or exploitable to the dominant system is no longer the basis of temporal flow.
Accelerationism discursively operates as a manifestation of Performance Philosophy: it is
an act of sorcery by which the theory practices itself through and by its own conceptual
mappings and navigations. This entangled assemblage of theory, method, and practice gives way
to an Active Historicism - Performative and Affective - operating History as an Aesthetic field. A
Postmodern approach to History does not simplify Time to a semiotic flow of Truth and
authorities, rather it complexifies the becoming of time, fragmenting narratives and liberating
‘Truth’ from Material-Rational reification loops and singularities. While this Schizohistorical
performativity maintains an iconoclastic function, it does not do so through an abandonment of
historical records, dates, research, documents, or information. An active and Aesthetic History
simply operates History beyond the limits of linear chronology, identifying the multiplicities of
24
Nagarestani, Cyclonopedia, 195-207.
11rhizomatic becoming and thus splicing, cutting, and folding fluid channels into each other and
themselves to manifest neo-extant perspectives. The past and the future are entities which are
present now, and their creative expansion deterritorializes narrative stasis, revealing old from
new: messages from the future through the past.
Occultural Esoterrorism
In the same vein as Post-Structural experimental Philosophy, twentieth-century Occultism
developed into and as theories and methods for infectious reality manipulation. Out of the epoch
of Victorian Esotericism and through the digital matrix of 1990s cyberspace, Occult currents and
their cultural receptions have radically modified themselves again and again, respawning a
“disenchanted magic” which maintains the subversive capacity to transgress the limits of an
instrumentalized representational Ontology.
Disenchanted magick can be understood broadly as magical theories and praxis which
have developed such that their functional mechanics are not outright inconsistent with the
dominant ontological control system of Objective Material-Rationality. The Disenchanted-
Ontology demarcates a “Secularized” semiotic territory within which Religious codifications as a
reality narrative are no longer afforded causal authority.25 Psychology, Affect Theory, and
Complex Systems Dynamics are among the operative ontological components utilized by
contemporary magicians to manipulate reified representation from within, through a
performative overlap and integration with Occult semiotics.
Developing from the psycho-affective aestheticization of Ritual Magick articulated by
and through Aleister Crowley, magick became as the experimental integration of will, thought,
and intention into and as reality itself.26 The magician who performs in a ritual inputs meaning
into reality, effectuating feedback-loops and noise within the networked hyper-linkages which
then perform as observable representation. Modulating this logic, computer programming and
the digital model of cyberspace are utilized by contemporary magicians to legitimize and
actualize their practice ontologically.27 Just as a programmer writes a code which will
semiotically manifest in, as, by, and throughout the internet, a magician – affectively imbedded
25
Hanegraaff, “How Magic Survived the disenchantment of the world.” 358.
26
Bogdan, “Aleister Crowley” The Occult World (ed. Partridge) 297-298.
27
Hanegraaff, “How Magic Survived the disenchantment of the world,” 370.
12in the communicative matrix of a materialist territory - can encode information into and as
representational reality. This cyclical un-differentiation of code and program by which the
program can (re)write the code is a fracturing of narrative consistency throughout reality; it is a
schizophrenic turn by which semiotic universality gives way to a plurality of contextualized and
immanent performative actualizations. Again, the Aesthetic aspect of reality manipulation is
utilized: the infestation of will into the controlled system of material causality is a creative
endeavor. Art and Occultism have queered their boundaries, utilizing image creation,
performative theatricality, sonic fragmentation, and narrative alterations to effectuate Onto-
Temporal aestheticizations of reality.
-
Through networked communication channels, the once hidden world of Occult orders,
traditions, and philosophies have become a cultural component, cut-up and distributed as a
variety of performative discursivities. This networked dissemination has made Occult Culture (or
rather ‘Occulture’) an ordinary facet of and as cultural communication hypercamouflaged within
the semiotic territories of information and entertainment. Here ‘ordinary’ does not necessarily
mean normalized as a belief, rather identifying accessibility and presence; occultural ideas in
television, film, and music do not maintain the same presence nor the depth of content as
scholarly discourse on Esoteric topics and currents, and none of the former hold the same socio-
political position and authority as Scientific Material-Rational discourse. None the less,
Occulture performs as and within both popular and academic culture, and furthermore as and
within artistic, spiritual, and sociopolitical culture. Due to this, Occulture has been institutionally
integrated into the rhizomatic network of representation: a subversive swarm disguised
throughout and as reified reality elements.
Privy to the Postmodern integration of Occulture into representational semiotic
territories, individuals actualizing the hybridization of Artist and Magician have utilized occult
art to engineer social modifications. This experimental occulture becomes as esoterrorism: “the
careful combination of art, sigilization, and the occult to bring about cultural change.”28 The
invocational naming of esoterrorism is credited to ‘Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth’ (TOPY):
Industrial Pagans in the 1980s prowling the underbelly of society as disaffected outsiders,
28
Christopher Partridge, “Esoterrorism and the Wrecking of Civilization,” 195.
13experimenting with networked chaos and manufacturing territorial fragmentations.29 Under the
guise of a fan club for experimental electronic group Psychick TV, TOPY circulated Chaos
Magick throughout occultural networks. TOPY was “a paramilitary occult order that was
secreted within something that seemed enough part of popular culture for it not to appear to be a
threat immediately.”30 This incursion of the outside from within became as affective
manipulations of social norms through the Hyperoccultation of artistic output, subversive re-
presentations of gender, and the cut-up redistribution of time itself.31
Esoterrorism both as an idea and a practice maintains a deterritorializing function: the
outside of non-representation is unleashed within reality as a challenge to not only social
codification, but the normalized ontological boundaries of causality. As disenchanted magick,
Esoterrorist action qua Aesthetic performativity rhizomatically actualizes the potentialities of
thought. A differentiation between Real and Unreal, Fact and Fiction is systematically
undermined as sorcerous esoterrorism seethes “the intensive operative of horror from within.”32
Aesthetaphysickal Reflexivity:
Occultural Accelerationism & Hyperstitional Esoterrorism
Entrenched in a semiotic field of technoscientific materiality, representational becoming has
been restricted to something physical, rational, and instrumental. The ‘Enchanted’ reality matrix
has been solved away through the institutional implementation of Scientific Objectivism and is
thus no longer an ontological problem throughout reality’s dominant narrative construct.
Ontological influences from Religion, spirituality, occult forces, or any other esoteric operations
of representational performance have been stripped of causal authority, disenchanting becoming
and enacting a secular onto-temporal reality network. Furthermore, any amendment to the
dominant control system such as to reintegrate an enchanted model of representation then stands
contrary both to the cybernetic reification system and the ‘Rational’ ideology of the material-
physical ontological system.
29
Ibid, 192-193.
30
Kinney, “Music, Magic & Media Mischief,” Thee Psychick Bible: The Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-
Orridge and Thee Thrid Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, 327.
31
See pages 35-40.
32
Reza Negarestani, “Cyclonopedia,” 203.
14As a solution to the rigid performativity of representational reality, a reintegration of an
enchanted semiotics qua ‘Re-Enchantment’ functions as a reaction to Disenchantment: a parallel
semiotic flow “couched entirely in oppositional terms.”33 This reactionary model necessitates a
linear process by which an enchanted semiotics is ‘let in’ to the sociocultural flow of techno-
materiality through ontological negotiations, gaining affective traction moving forward. Given
the technoscientific commodification industry of Material-Capitalism, the institutional re-
codification of enchantment seems unlikely, unrealistic, and unaffordable; in a network both
founded (and funded) upon the cybernetic teleonomy of the scientific model as objective truth,
questioning the authority of the systems of control by which said model is propagated
undermines the holistic efficacy of the narrative territory.
The ‘problem’ of the ontological system enacted by the Enlightenment and perpetuated
cybernetically through its application has thus become the lack of meta-critical engagement of
the system in and by itself. Though Science has a control system of experimental checks and
balances to ensure objective validity, the absence of a ‘meta’ component for and within Science
itself has conditioned an autonomous reflexivity propagated as a linear vector; the territorialized
reality network only receives feedback from within itself, as the feedback mechanisms have been
designed and designated by and through the network itself. In light of this, developmental
deterritorializations of the dominant narrative territory cannot be employed as oppositional
programs. Non-representation beyond the limits of the semiotic field will remain as ‘the outside’
as long as the limit is determined not by what it is not, but what it can be. That which is outside
the control system of science is non-scientific, and therefore cannot be validated as objectively
true and real phenomenon and thus integrated moving ‘forward.’
The practice of Disenchanted Magick developed throughout the twentieth century
identifies localized subversive performances of onto-temporal becoming which manifest within
the confines or codified representation. Having adapted their practice to the constraints of
materialist systematics, Postmodern magicians effectuate aesthetic manipulations of reality
through an insurgent embrace of the dominant narrative rather than though an antithetical
rejection of the semiotic territory. Furthermore, the invocation of the concept Esoterrorism has
weaponized the subversive insurgency of disenchanted magick, locating a means to spread
magick’s affective contagion throughout occultural networks. This plague of ‘the outside
33
Asprem, The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse 1900 – 1939, 26.
15manifesting within’ identifies the groundwork for a steganographic occupation of representation:
an alternative to Re-Enchantment which accentuates and utilizes the consistency of aesthetic
performance across Ontology, Physics, Magick, Philosophy, technology, and the entire matrix of
sociocultural becoming.
Interspliced with the Sorcery of Postmodern Philosophy, the network-mechanics of
esoterrorist action maintain the capacity to hijack the virtual-actual feedback modification
complex of History and Hyperstitionalize an ontological virus within and throughout the
rhizomatic becoming of multi-temporal representation. This virus will maintain a
deterritorializing function for the outside from within, establishing tractions for non-represented
reality components to aesthetically become as affective vectors, corroborating occultural lines of
flight both throughout and as a plurality of reality narratives. Performing as an overlap between
Fiction and Fact, emic and etic, Art and scholarship, the infectious plague know as
Aesthetaphysicks will seethe throughout Academia and sociocultural becoming, a theory and
practice which has been cast back through History from the future, actualizing its infectious
virulence into present Academia.
Aesthetaphysicks performs as an experimental Complex-Systems-Theory of and as Onto-
Temporal-Network Aesthetics; a Philosophy of, for, and from Hyperstition, Occulture, and
Accelerationism: the creative manipulation of time, reality, culture, History, and society as art
by artistic means. The identification of - and as such performance of representation as - a
network of aesthetic Onto-Temporality gives way to the rhizomatic becoming of reality through
a schizo-fragmented flow of unlimited semiosis.34 By a networked aestheticization of reality, the
systems which codify and perform representation will be identified as creative programs,
actualizing their artistic capacity and effectuating non-traditional spaces for experimentation
across the sociocultural information matrix, thus conditioning an anonymous reflexivity
propagated by non-linear vector multiplicities.35
With Aesthetaphysicks comes a scholarly grounding for magick: esoteric exploration into
the occult dimensions of the represented and the non-representational through the thinking and
34
Aichele, “Demons of the New Polytheism,” The Lure of the Darkside, 147.
35
This Anonymous as opposed to Autonomous reflexivity identifies the means of production by which the network
is maintained, expanded, and engaged. While autonomous reflexivity is limited to the linear feedback of the
Scientific system by its own standards and measures, an anonymous reflexivity is an opensource mode of
feedback, developing from a multiplicity of input measures and hypertextual cross-feedback circuits.
16theory of Postmodernism. Through the pursuit of this Aesthetaphysickal theory, ritual practices,
ideas, and potentials from distant historical periods identified as ‘Occult,’ ‘Esoteric,’ or
‘Spiritual’ can be reimagined as aesthetic modes and methods of and for Hyperstitionalization,
and from such, the aesthetic (re)engineering of reality. Aesthetaphysicks gives way to and is the
very practice and performance of Occultural Accelerationism. As a social theory,
Accelerationism manipulates our present by means of prepresentational futures through a
Hyperstitionalized past. By means of Occultural content, Aesthetaphysicks will engage and
contribute to the contemporary political discourse surrounding and founded upon
Accelerationism by opening a space for Magick-as-Art-as-Philosophy to posit Futures and
people to come affectively consistent with contemporary Feminist, Post-Colonial, and Queer
Theory. Aesthetaphysicks as a means of Occultural Accelerationism also brings an up to date
knowledge of ‘Western Esotericism’ and Disenchantment discourse into Accelerationist and
contemporary Philosophical discourse, deterritorializing the academic rut of Re-Enchantment
theory and instead giving way to a method and mode for a Hyperoccultation36 of
Representational reality.
It is of note that Aesthetaphysicks is not an anti-scientific theory; Science is not
something useless to be rejected, nor can its presence be abstracted from any plausible futures
vector. The problem presented by and through the strict and authoritative Scientific worldview is
its conservative stasis by which non-representation is excluded and value-based utility (located
by hetero-normative performativity) is the standard for presentational development. Unlike Re-
Enchantment discourse, Hyperoccultation is not something parallel to a Disenchanted reality
narrative which then must be negotiated into being through a reactionary politics. The
performance of Hyperoccultation through Aesthetaphysickal theory will simply open spaces
within and around Science and the dominant control programs, theoretically allowing for inter
and intra-disciplinary experimentation, and furthermore ‘rational’ foundations for non-material
representation, affect, and becoming.
-
While the system, project, and practice of Aesthetaphysicks draws heavily from a
distorted conceptualization of historical materials as a vector for Schizohistorical disorientation,
the proposed methodology functions through a combination of Meta-Analysis, Rhizomatic-
36
Amy Ireland, “The Poememenon: Form as Occult Technology,” 13-15.
17Discourse-Analysis, and ( )hole complex. The Meta-Analytic aspect of this methodology allows
for the engagement of content across large chunks of research material, topics, or fields and
gives way to a synthesis of said informational content. The Rhizomatic-Discourse-Analysis
component also engages large amounts of content, but rather than focusing on a synthesis of
information it both engages and produces performative hypertextuality between works, ideas,
thinkers, and time periods in and as a non-linear and constantly evolving rhizome of
interconnectivities. The application of a Rhizomatic-Discourse-Analysis brings into the research-
complex diverse lenses such as Semiotics, Historiography, Phenomenology, and Schizo-Anaysis
without being limited to any one rigid system or its epistemic baggage. Finally, ( )hole complex
is the relationship between ‘solid and void’ within dynamic networks. What this means is that in
a solid37 there are voids, holes, pockets, or more simply inconsistencies. In operating ( )hole
complex qua methodology, it is not a matter of engaging these holes as a matter of critique, but
rather utilizing said holes in order to let the ‘solid’ further develop in-itself; this allows for the
whole to breath and grow into something new but the same, and is as much a creative endeavor
as a scholarly practice. By operating these three methodologies within one cut-up method,
academic research which simultaneously engages and (re)develops at a textual, theoretical,
Social, Historical, and Aesthetic level performs as an interdisciplinary and Postmodern scholarly
praxis.
Utilizing the above research program, this thesis will investigate and understand
twentieth-century occultism by and as Postmodern Philosophical theory in order to demonstrate
both the intellectual and practical relevance of occult(ural) praxis within contemporary social,
philosophical, and aesthetic discourse. The following investigation will thus be executed by
pitching and mapping Aesthetaphysickal theory back and through twentieth-century occult
currents. This retroactive historical incursion functions both to manifest and accelerate a
schizophrenic and aesthetic tradition of onto-temporal Hyperstitionalization which will give way
to the very development of the methods by which Aesthetaphysicks will and has
Hyperstitionalized its own actual becoming.
Rather than demonstrate causal influences and intentional applications between historical
actors and periods, this work will perform Historiography, Philosophy, Art Theory, and
37
These ‘solids’ can be performed as a whole or holistic thing, be it a (reality) network, society, an academic
discipline, a scholarly theory, or more simply an essay, a book, a painting, or any work of art, etc.
18Occultism in a decentralized flux, giving way to a discursive alienation and hypertextual
feedback-loops. Decentralized from their conditioned disciplinary territories, the realty
production brought upon through the sorcerous concept engineering of Postmodern Philosophy
will feed into the practical reality reordering practiced and articulated by and through twentieth-
century magick. This feedback then serves to blur the distinction between magick and
Philosophy, performing Philosophy as magick as Philosophy, and becoming as a ‘Hyperstitional
Esoterrorism,’ rhizomatically infecting academic information-networks. The proposed thesis is
not making an argument about any historical relationship between Philosophy and Occultism,
but rather conducting an experiment which will explore the very (un)limits of thought each
discourse opens, in, through, and as each other. This experiment is thus in-itself modeled
utilizing the theory it is putting forward; not a hypothesis, test, and a conclusion, but an Aesthetic
engagement deterritorializing the semiotic codifications of Material-Rationalist idea dissipation
by means of a creative ‘aesthetic logic’ becoming through itself. As such, the following does not
detail an essentialist or universalist position, but a reflexive demonstration of the very theory
under analysis; an articulation of that which is being articulated. This Schizohistorical
experimentality is thus the theory and the topic of the work at hand, a performative didacticism
as reverse-ascriptive discourse infestation.
Having established a performative conceptual network of sociocultural and onto-aesthetic
contextualization in the present section ‘Plex,’ the following section ‘Time-Circuit’ will detail a
schizohistorical tradition of and for Aesthetaphysicks, networked multi-temporally across Chaos
Magick, the Church of Satan, Thee Temple ov Pyschick Youth, and the Cybernetic Culture
Research Unit. From this, the final section ‘Warp’ will then detail practical applications of
Aesthetaphysickal theory in contemporary art and scholarship, demarcating Aesthetaphysicks’
efficacy as a prepresentational ‘Post’ vector for and as Occultural Accelerationism. The holistic
becoming of this work - both as an object and a performance - will function to reintegrate the
superfluous research conducted across Western Esotericism into Postmodern academic and
artistic spaces. By performing within and across contemporary post-structural discourse(s),
Aesthetaphysicks as Occultural Accelerationism will demonstrate a deterritorialization of the
Religio-Historical narratives conditioning the development of Western Esotericism, opening the
space for a creative (re)engagement and propagation of the information network’s semiotic flow.
19Time-Circuit
Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
Chaos Reigns
A magical tradition can be understood as a semiotic territory within which magicians learn to
interpret their experiences.38 Throughout this territory, systematic narratives propagate the
efficacy conditions by which the magical workings of a group or individual function. These
narratives (per)form a belief system as and for a model of cybernetic participation which
autocatalyzes the actual becoming of magical affect. Belief in a codified system subjectively
maps the territory within and by which the ritual and practices of that system function, and by
mapping the territory the system is then given a creative space in which to observably perform.39
Invoked as a viral swarm, Chaos Magick is not a belief system in itself but an
(un)tradition of iconoclastic deterritorializations: a methodological cross-utilization of multiple
tradition-systems subjectively folded and cut into each other.40 The functionality of Chaos
Magickal praxis thus becomes by performative belief (or metaprogramming)41 and the
Hyperstitionalized ontological feedback complex of observed efficacy-actualizations. Chaos
Magick in this way engages the Postmodern practice of hypertextual systems-communications: a
rhizomatic networking of autonomous narratives so as to perform a decentralized flow of non-
represented semiotic becoming. As an (un)tradition, Chaos Magick is then spread through and as
a discourse of innovative subversions, a paradoxical continuity of discontinuity entangled by a
complex of iconoclastic perennialism.42
Twentieth-century occultism performs magick as the “science and art of causing change
to occur in conformity with will.”43 With this operative magical mode, rather than subscribing to
38
Hine, Oven Ready Chaos, 35.
39
An example of this phenomenon in a historical context would be the Theory of Correspondences or Doctrine of
Signatures employed in Renaissance Magic. Performing within a Neo-Platonic territory, ‘natural’ objects (which
resemble for example bodily organs) affectively engage a causal circuit between the natural object and their
corresponding biophysical component; a walnut looks like a brain and as such its utilization in medicine will affect
the brain. See Hanegraaff, “How Magic Survived the disenchantment of the world,” 361-365.
40
Metaprogramming is the technique of “belief shifting,” articulated by twentieth-century writer and occultist
Robert Anton Wilson, which can be understood as fully adopting and embracing a belief but only for a select
period of time. Hine, Oven Ready Chaos, 10; 40.
41
Ibid, 36.
42
Duggan, “Perennialism and Iconoclasm: Chaos Magick and the Legitimacy of innovation,” 97-98; 112.
43
Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, xii.
20the limited codifications of a single tradition’s effectuation narrative a Chaos Magician can pick
and choose theory, rituals, aesthetic elements, or even entire systems (actual or virtual)44 by
which to creatively manifest a magical vector as and for their will. The efficacy of the
performative Chaos system is then hinged upon the Magician’s belief that it will function.
Magical accomplishments become by the subjective belief that what one is doing is and will
produce affective noise within and across representation, and from such said affect is something
empirically observable. Through an active application of ( )hole complex, a Chaos Magician
establishes a systematized logic for how and why their magic will work, thus conditioning a
semiotic territory within which their will may spread. Transgressing the historical authorities
which legitimize a magical system’s authenticity, a Chaos magician has only to convince
themselves that what they are doing makes sense and as such will function,45 establishing an
aestheticological territory to consequently observe manifestations of their will in the world.
Becoming in a disenchanted reality matrix of material-physicality, the subjective
legitimization of magical praxis is conditionally territorialized by the rigid codifications of
scientific theory; because the magician performs within a controlled field of representation, the
manifestation of will is also to some degree contextualized by semiotic codifications. For the
Chaos Magician to legitimize and thus believe in their magick’s functionality, their magical
vector must infest representation as an incursion of the outside from within. As legitimizing
narratives to hypercamouflage magical affect, Chaos Magicians have adopted and adapted
scientific theories for vector propagation. By the mathematical articulation of Chaos Theory,
Chaos is performed through fluctuations of complex-system’s initial states which then gain
traction and accelerate large-scale evolutionary changes across a system’s network.46 The
cybernetic network mechanics of Chaos Theory thus establish a dynamic logic by which Chaos
Magick can then utilize additional complex network theories such as the Neuroscience, Quantum
Physics, or even Internet cyber-communications to legitimize the functionality of a large variety
of magical intentionality.
44
Postmodern occultist Kenneth Grant, (pupil, secretary, and post-mortem editor to Aleister Crowley and a
student of Austin Osman Spare) developed a system of ‘Typhonian Magick’ based off of the reality manifest by
author H.P. Lovecraft, specifically the Hyperstitional text ‘The Necronomicon’. See Evans, The History of British
Magick After Crowley: Kenneth Grant, Amando Crowley, Chaos Magic, Satanism, Lovecraft, The Left-Hand Path,
Blasphemy and Magical Morality, 284-343.
45
Hanegraaff, “How Magic Survived the disenchantment of the world,” 368.
46
Duggan, “Chaos Magick,” The Occult World, 406.
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